Dialogue between a Man and His God

Dialogue between a Man and His God
Tablet AO 4462 of the “Dialogue between a Man and His God”
Height	11.5 cm
Width	6.8 cm
Created	c. 1664 BC
Discovered	before 1906 Baghdad, Baghdad Governorate, Iraq
Present location	Paris, Ile-de-France, France
Language	Akkadian

The Dialogue between a Man and His God is the earliest known text to address the answer to the question of why a god permits evil, or theodicy, a reflection on human suffering. It is a piece of Wisdom Literature extant on a single clay cuneiform tablet written in Akkadian and attributed to Kalbanum, on the last line, an individual otherwise unknown. It is dated to the latter part of the Old Babylonian period, around the reign of Ammi-Ditana (reigned 1683–1640s BC) according to Lambert, and is currently housed in the Louvre Museum, accession number AO 4462. It is of unknown provenance as it was purchased from an antiquities dealer by the Museum in 1906.^[1] It shares much of its style with an earlier Sumerian work, “Man and His God”, a penitential prayer of the Ur III period.^[2]